Matt Skof, president of the Ottawa Police Association, and Ottawa police Chief Charles Bordeleau make their way along the parade route during Capital Pride's 2016 parade. Ashley Fraser / Ottawa Citizen

Nine months after the group that’s supposed to connect Ottawa police to the city’s queer community nearly tore itself apart over Chief Charles Bordeleau’s decision to march in uniform in the city’s gay-pride parade, it’s still in crisis, according to members and its own records.

“The police report something, we report something, they say they’re going to look into it, we never hear back,” said Jeremy Dias, the director of the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity and a volunteer member of the committee. It’s a story borne out by a year’s worth of official minutes from the Ottawa police gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) liaison committee.

They describe monthly meetings that devolve into primal screams about how participants don’t know whether it’s worth showing up or whether anybody cares about what they’re doing. Meetings end without resolutions of major discussions and with no clear sense of what the committee might do next.

The Ottawa police’s liaison committee on race relations voted last fall to address its own crisis of purpose by tearing itself down and starting over. The GLBT liaison committee is still suffering.

Jeremy Dias, director of the Canadian Centre for Gender and Sexual Diversity.Sabrina Bedford /
Postmedia Network

Dias, a national activist and recipient of one of Mayor Jim Watson’s city-builder awards, wrote the mayor last week asking him to intervene. The mayor punted responsibility to Coun. Eli El-Chantiry, who chairs the city’s police board.

“I do not have the background on the issues you raise, and further, the Police Services Board is not involved in the operations of the Committee. For these reasons, I will ask Chief Bordeleau to review the concerns you raise and arrange for a response,” El-Chantiry replied in an email to Dias.

Until the past few weeks, the top cop on the committee was Insp. John McGetrick, a 30-year veteran. He’s given way to Staff Sgt. Sandra Sparling, a veteran officer herself. The non-police membership is fluid, though Dias has been a regular for years.

I asked for an interview with McGetrick or Sparling, indicating by email the general issues I wanted to talk about. Nobody would speak but the police sent a short statement on Tuesday, attributed jointly to Sparling and the committee’s civilian co-chair Christine Drummond.

“We have recently undergone a transition of leadership. We will reflect on what has transpired over the last year; and see what we need to do in order to move forward in 2018,” it says.

Black Lives Matter protesters stopped Toronto’s gay-pride parade in June 2016, in a confrontation over whether police, whom the protesters accused of collective racism and brutality, should be in the parade and under what conditions. It was a big, nationwide deal.

Members of Black Lives Matter Toronto take part in the annual Pride Parade in Toronto in 2016, before stopping it in protest.Mark Blinch /
The Canadian Press

Although Ottawa’s Pride parade that August went off without an equivalent protest, Dias raised the question of police participation in Ottawa’s Pride events when the liaison committee met in September after its standard two-month summer break.

“Why didn’t we, the liaison committee, host a meeting for the community and listen? Just listen?” Dias said he proposed. “We don’t even need to pick a side. We can just hear people’s feedback and produce a report.”

Although the committee’s minutes are full of inconclusive discussions of police in the parade over multiple meetings, plans to host a forum didn’t make it onto an agenda until the following June.

In the meantime, Bordeleau and Pride organizers had been talking. In May 2017, the committee got this update on the discussions: “There is currently no official statement from either (the Ottawa Police Service) or Capital Pride to this matter, other than Chief Bordeleau expressing that he is willing to respect whatever decision Capital Pride comes to.”

In June, the committee decided to hold a forum and then broke for the summer without specifically planning one.

The committee had an emergency meeting in July, where basically all of the non-police members asked variations of the same basic thing: What is the point of this group?

This Pride fight is symbolic of bigger problems, they said. We need a top-to-bottom re-examination of how the police treat GLBT citizens, how they’re trained, how the department answers complaints.

Police members of the committee said they felt personally attacked, in and out of the committee.

According to the minutes, Sparling said the hostility “risks tearing the community apart — especially the openly LGBTQ+ officers who are working on the inside and who not only no longer feel welcome in the LGBTQ+ communities, but also that working on these issues is becoming too much of a liability to their own personal lives to be worth the risk.”

Insp. John McGetrick at the scene of a fire in 2016.Ashley Fraser /
Ottawa Citizen

Gay cops used to worry about being openly gay among the police, she said. Increasingly, gay cops worry about being openly cops among gay people.

Watson had sent an aide, Mathieu Gravel, who “indicated that the community should have more understanding for the police as many of the things which they are requesting take time, but also indicated that the police have a responsibility to prove progress and motion on the issues.” Concrete timelines and commitments would help move things along, he suggested.

McGetrick said yes, but we’re at least 200 officers short of what we need to police Ottawa properly, so no wonder stuff like GLBT relations gets short shrift sometimes, the minutes of the meeting say. Plus when we hold public events, often hardly anybody shows up.

The group agreed again that a public forum on the relationship between the police and Ottawa’s GLBT community would be a good idea. McGetrick said he’d see whether Bordeleau wanted to participate, because then “at least some resources of some kind will be allocated to assist.”

That was in late July. No forum was held.

After a month, Bordeleau backed down. He marched in the Pride parade in a police golf shirt, a decision Dias praised at the time.

“The liaison committee heard from community members asking OPS (Ottawa Police Service) officers not to wear their uniform in the parade,” the joint statement from the committee chairs said Tuesday. “A group of officers met with the chief and it was decided that OPS would respect the community’s request.”

On the committee, the bad feelings have festered.

September’s meeting, the first after Pride, included a discussion of what it meant to feel safe in a meeting of the liaison committee itself. For police, safety is a roomful of armed officers. For people who want to talk about trauma and hate, it’s a place to speak without being judged or interrupted.

You can think the notion of safe spaces is just so much blarney, of course. The people volunteering their time to help the police deal better with Ottawa’s queer communities don’t. If, after 25 years, they and the police are still struggling to use the same language, things are not going well at all.

The politicians who nominally oversee the police for the community wash their hands of it all, and say the only place to go with any of these problems is to the police.

Police challenges:

The police GLBT liaison committee might not solve many problems, but it hears about a lot of them. A sample:

In April, the committee talked about trying to recruit more queer police officers. Recruits go through background checks conducted by 27 retired officers. Twenty-five of the 27 are men, all are white, one is “LGBT-identified”. None is required to be trained in discrimination or diversity.

The police acknowledged this isn’t great and talked about getting current police officers doing the checks, so they aren’t all in the hands of people who reflect the police forces of 30 or 40 years ago. They’re introducing a standard template of questions.

As the police moved to online crime reporting to save time and money, Dias pointed out that the web forms for reporting should be designed with consideration for things like non-binary gender identities. To report a crime online, you’re required to tell the police a lot about yourself, including your gender.

The final form, in use now for reports including hate crimes, gives two gender options: male and female.

The Toronto, Peel and York police use an online reporting system clearly programmed by the same shop, but with variations. They allow gender selections of “other” or “unknown,” which at least allow for other possibilities. London uses the same form design, too, and like Ottawa restricts your choices to “male” and “female.”

In June, in an answer to a complaint, the committee heard that the format is set by the provincial government.

Brent Ross, a spokesman for the provincial community safety ministry, said each police force decides what information to ask for. The province sets no requirements.

“We plan to look into this issue further, in the near future,” the police say.

In November, the committee decided it would be a good idea to set up a social media account but had some concerns about practicalities, like who would have the authority to tweet and how to make sure the committee didn’t appear to represent the police service itself. Members agreed to send them to a subcommittee to sort out.

“Further discussion and formation of the subcommittee was tabled due to lack of time,” the minutes say.

It was the last thing on the agenda. The meeting, 31 minutes old, adjourned.

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